Mark A. Ragan's "Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains"

Mark A. Ragan is an emeritus professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at the University of Queensland. From 2000 to 2014, he served as founding head of IMB's Genomics and Computational Biology division. He concurrently served as founding director of the Australian Research Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and later co-founded QFAB Informatics. Ragan is co-author of A Biochemical Phylogeny of the Protists (1978) and numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Cell, Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Microbiology, PNAS, and more. He is a former president and an honorary lifetime member of the International Seaweed Association and currently senior fellow of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society.

Ragan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains: The History of High-Level Biological Classification, and reported the following:

Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains explores how the living world has been conceptualized, from prehistoric times up to the present day. Broad groups of natural beings can be discerned in early figurative art, symbolic language, folk taxonomies, and creation myths. High-level concepts of plants and animals were afoot a couple of generations before Aristotle, and became embedded in all manner of esoteric, religious, philosophical and practical traditions. Many beings, however, fit uncomfortably, if at all, into these high-level groups. Different organisms were considered problematic at different times and for various reasons, and our narrative follows these changing currents.

Page 99 of the print edition discusses the Rasā’il (Epistles) of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā (Brethren of Purity), an “esoteric fraternity” of intellectuals active in Tenth-century Iraq. (The discussion starts at the bottom of page 98, and runs to mid-page 100). For the Brethren, man is a microcosmos, while conversely the world is “a macroanthropos endowed with a body, a soul, a life, and knowledge”. They recognize three (mineral, plant, animal) or four genera (these plus man) of sublunar beings, and arrange them in a hierarchy of “nobility” or “purity” of universal soul. Minerals arise by a coagulation of fundamental substances, while metals arise from mercury and sulphur in a second stage of mixing and natural refinement. Let us quote the paragraphs on plants and animals in full, omitting seven footnotes:

Plants— ‘every body that comes out from earth, is nourished, and grows’ — are of three kinds: trees, crops, and herbs. Unlike minerals, plants cannot be transformed into one another. The vegetative soul brings about seven biological functions: attraction, retention, digestion, expulsion, nutrition, formation, and accretion. The Brethren’s description of the mineral-plant interface is difficult to understand, but involves ‘green manure’ (moss?) and truffles, one a ‘vegetal mineral’, the other a ‘mineral plant’. Other vegetal degrees rank above these, and share with animals the sense of touch. The plant adjacent to the animal degree is the date palm, an ‘animal plant, as some of its actions and states are distinct from the states of plants, even though its body is a plant’ and ‘a plant with regard to its body, but an animal with regard to its soul’. Parasitic plants, which draw nutrition not from the earth but (like a worm) from trees, likewise exhibit the actions of the animal soul. Coral is a plant.

The Brethren classify animals in several ways, employing diverse criteria. With regard to the faculties of soul they recognize five stages: worms that breed in clay (the lowest, ‘almost on a par with plants’, with only the sense of touch); worms that crawl on leaves, with taste and touch; animals which live in the deep sea and other dark places, which additionally have the sense of smell; insects, possessing these plus hearing; and perfect animals, which also have sight. Worms in general are ‘vegetal animals’ because their body ‘grows as some plants do, but it stands autonomously, and because of the fact that it moves its body with a voluntary movement, it is an animal.’ More specifically, the lowest animal is the ‘cane worm’, perhaps referring to the snail.

The text goes on to consider how the Brethren arrange the animals within each class, then returns to their terminology “vegetal animal” and “animal plant”; mentions their argument that the human embryo is successively under the influence of the vegetable (the first four months) and animal souls (months five until birth), with the human soul taking control only thereafter; and concludes with their message that animals have intrinsic worth beyond utility to man: “Animals were created by Allāh, and praise Him as they are able”.

How does the Page 99 Test perform in this instance? Over 449 pages of text, 182 pages of endnotes, and 139 pages of references, Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains explores hundreds of high-level biological classifications, many fundamentally different from that of the Brethren. Their use of storytelling to make an argument is uncommon outside the Arabic tradition, while the availability of modern English translations sets their Rasā’il apart from most Arabic and Islamic works of this era. Like many other ancients, however, the Brethren draw on Pythagoras and Neoplatonism, and the main concepts they put in play – plants, animals, man, borderline beings, hierarchy, soul, form, function, movement – reappear throughout the book. On balance, the Page 99 Test works acceptably well for Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains.

Learn more about Kingdoms, Empires, and Domains at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott MacLochlainn's "The Copy Generic"

Scott MacLochlainn is assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his 2022 book, The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds, and reported the following:

If one opens The Copy Generic, I’m not fully sure you would immediately be able to decipher the main themes and thrust of the book. Out of the entire book, page 99 might actually be one of the least legible in terms of the overall thematic! But the chapter that it is part of, Chapter 3, “Source Mimesis: How We Think about the Unauthored and Collectively Owned,” I think does a good job of capturing the book’s overall argument. The book is concerned with describing the importance of the concept of the “generic” for understanding how we collectively navigate and sort through different worlds of media and meaning. So rather than dismissing generic things as copies and knock-offs, or the culturally disused, I argue in the book that to think about the generic is actually to think about how we produce and rely on universals and shared backdrops, and how we need easily accessible ways to categorize and sort things in the world in order to make sense of everything. That can be using generic language, shared templates for urban infrastructures, or musical genres on Spotify. Because I’m an anthropologist, part of the book is ethnographic, with the latter chapters describing how different Christian groups in the Philippines have forged a “generic Christianity,” that is how a shared, baseline form of Christianity had slowly emerged among a community, sometimes as a way to overcome religious difference and sometimes to try to convert one another.

Chapter 3, and page 99, is about media and copyright law, and other spaces that highlight how we need to start thinking differently about ownership and authorship in order to avoid remaining stuck in the quagmire of seeing everything as either originals and copies. While we are increasingly living amidst a social milieu in which the coherence of originality and authorship are fraying at the edges (the recent emergence of AI highlights this—what or who is the origin and author of a piece of writing on Chat GPT?), we often revert to such concepts when we start talking about ownership. Why is this so? The legal system, for example, still struggles with drawing clear lines in copyright and patent law, and inevitably relies on determining some space of originality to be the place in which real value (and thus ownership) inheres.

On page 99, I happen to be discussing something very different—the Irish experience with world’s fairs in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In exhibitions in the Irish capital, Dublin, the country was presented as a modern, cosmopolitan European nation, while at world’s fairs such as those at Chicago in 1893, or St. Louis in 1904, one found readymade full rural and “authentic” Irish villages, laden with Celtic designs and with people handweaving and cooking over open fires. Interestingly, it was often the same people organizing (or authoring) the two versions of Ireland on display. On page 99, I describe how these representations were similarly predicated on well-known generic types of thinking about Ireland and national cultures. Of course, somewhat ironically, the bucolic, parochial aversion Ireland ended up being the most modern version, predicting as it did the future of global tourism, and the commodification of culture, something that Ireland ended up at the centre of a century later.

Learn more about The Copy Generic at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Lea's "Digitizing Diagnosis"

Andrew S. Lea is a resident physician in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Digitizing Diagnosis: Medicine, Minds, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Questions about how to describe and represent computers nagged at the hematology team as well. Ralph Engle’s perspective on the nature of the computer—and its relationship to the human—was rather more nuanced than that of many of his contemporaries. Pioneers in biomedical computing frequently lamented that physicians seemed to suffer from the computer allergy more severely than did any other professional group. The unreceptive attitude of many traditional practitioners was widely recognized as a, if not the, central barrier to getting computing technologies out of the research laboratory and into the clinic. In 1966, Stephen Yarnall and Richard Kronmal characterized the “psychological resistance” among physicians to computers in diagnosis. In their view, this resistance had three primary facets: “First, physicians have traditionally approached diagnosis in their own individual manner, and attempts at systematization are generally unwelcome; second, many of the systems introduced to-date have required more, rather than less, work by the physician with no immediate gain apparent to him or his patient; third, physicians, and many laymen, fear computers as strange and impersonal machines which may destroy meaningful doctor-patient relationships and even displace physicians to some extent.”

Engle shared these concerns about an unreceptive, even antagonistic, clinical audience. But it was actually the opposite attitude—uncritical acceptance— that came to trouble Engle more deeply. Physicians, he believed, needed a deep understanding of how a computer program worked; only then would they be able to effectively evaluate its clinical value and, more crucially, its limitations: “It concerns me that some physicians are only too anxious to let a laboratory test or a computer make their decision. These tools should only be one input into the decision-making process. The physician must add his own perspective.” The output of a computer program, Engle warned, can convey a false decisiveness that physicians may be all too eager to accept uncritically. “The aura of finality and correctness of the computer,” Engle predicted, “will be difficult for some physicians to overcome.” The single computer output did little to convey the messy, contingent, partial, and uncertain choices that the developers made in creating the program. The computer’s rigid outputs might convey a false impression of certitude.

Engle feared that the language surrounding computerized diagnosis, with phrasing like “thinking machines” and “artificial intelligence,” may undercut any measured understanding of a computer program’s limitations. Specifically, Engle seems to have feared that a “living” metaphor about the computer risked gradually shading into a “dead” one; that is, he worried that metaphors may lose their status as mere figures of speech and begin to be interpreted as real or literal. Artificial intelligence may come to be taken as intelligence, full stop.

Page 99 of Digitizing Diagnosis does not convey the book’s core arguments, but it does give a nice synopsis of one of its themes: namely, the inner disquietude stirred by the earliest efforts to computerize medical diagnosis. Much of this resistance came from fears that computers would hasten the dehumanization of medicine. As many creators of early computerized systems recognized, doctors’ psychological resistance to computers was a large barrier to the successful implementation of computerized diagnostic programs. Yet the reverse psychological stance—that of openness—also posed threats of its own, as Engle describes here.

This excerpt speaks to a larger problematic that engineers came up against, one that runs through this book. Developers of computer systems frequently found themselves toggling between, and trying to reconcile, divergent conceptions of “the physician”—their attributes, attitudes, and aptitudes. Were physicians rational, learned, and atomistic clinical actors, loathe to see the computer enter the medical realm? Or were they fallible beings, only too eager to outsource their cognitive labor to lab tests and algorithms?

In trying to implement computerized systems, engineers found themselves in what STS scholars have called “the dilemma of application.” On the one hand, adoption of computerized tools depended on physicians not feeling threatened or undermined by them. But on the other hand, the justification for clinical decision support systems was predicated on the assumption that physicians needed help—that their capabilities were limited, their rationality bounded. Many of the same paranoias and paradoxes that plagued early computerized diagnostic systems continue to shape efforts to imagine, create, and implement machine learning algorithms in medicine today.

Follow Andrew Lea on Twitter and visit his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hafsa Kanjwal's "Colonizing Kashmir"

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World.

Kanjwal applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Tourism and cinema served to territorialize India’s colonial occupation in both its secular modernizing and Hindu nationalist avatars and in some ways highlighted the co-constitutive relationship between the two. It also enabled an unquenchable desire of Indians toward Kashmir (and some Kashmiris) that would continue to undergird India’s strategic rule in Kashmir.

Page 99 of the book is at the beginning of the third chapter, “Producing and Promoting Paradise,” and both provides the argument for the chapter, and also situates how Kashmir historically came to be “special place” in precolonial and colonial texts. The chapter overall examines how tourism and Indian cinema consolidated the desire for Kashmir in the Indian colonial imagination and “reordered a religious, spatial, and gendered imaginary of Kashmir that was both linked to and in need of India. Kashmir was a place to be seen and experienced, and in turn, to claim.” An important overall argument of the book—that Hindu sacred geographies and histories were pivotal to “Nehruvian secularism” in India—is also mentioned on this page. In this way, the Page 99 Test works very well as readers would get a very good idea of some of the broader arguments of the book and the interventions it tries to make in South Asian historiography.

The book examines the different modalities of control that the Indian government and its client regimes used to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir. These policies were mostly directed at Kashmiris—but, in this case, they were also directed towards Indian citizens. On this page, readers will be introduced to how the governments prioritized an affective attachment to Kashmir through cinema and tourism, which then enabled the average Indian citizen to lay “claim” to Kashmir. The second half of the page then delves into how Mughal and British colonial accounts also used the idea of Kashmir as a “paradise” in order to consolidate their rule.

Visit Hafsa Kanjwal's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Valeri's "The Opening of the Protestant Mind"

Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His book Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library.

Valeri applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, and reported the following:

Page 99 provides visual evidence for a major theme in the book. It is taken up by an image of an engraving by Hubert-François Gravelot, which served as the frontispiece of Thomas Broughton’s 1742 An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to this Present Time. There is little text to explain, but the reader nonetheless could readily identify the central figures. A statue of a calf, atop a pedestal, marks the top half of the scene. It frames a set of large religious structures in the background: a Catholic cathedral, an Islamic mosque, an Egyptian pyramid, and a classical pagan temple. The middle of the scene is dominated by three figures: Moses with the tablets of the Commandments, Mary with a communion cup and a cross, and Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammad and the figurehead for Shiite Muslims, with a copy of the Qur’an.

This image illustrates Broughton’s view of the religions of the world, but the reader would only get the full import of the page by reading the expository text on the two pages that precede and follow 99. The reader of my book will be struck not only by the inclusion of an Islamic figure to illustrate admirable religion but also by the overall point: an Anglican cleric, Broughton, like the other Anglo-American commentators of the mid-eighteenth century, did not validate or excoriate any religion as a whole. They looked for morally commendable traditions within all religions, represented in Gravelot’s engraving by the law of Moses, the piety of Mary, and the moral earnestness of Islam. In contrast, the “idolatrous” figures represent religion-gone-bad, corrupted by priestcraft, irrational zeal, and political power. The image gets to the heart of the argument of the work if read in such terms.

This book traces a change in Anglo-American Protestant perceptions of the religions of the world, and notions of religious conversion, from 1650 to 1765, with special attention to English colonial ventures and missions to Indigenous Americans. It explains the political forces that compelled commentators, including authors of dictionaries of the world’s religions such as Broughton, to abandon previous paradigms according to which all non-Protestant religions were, as a whole, idolatrous, demonic, and seditious. The political circumstances that shaped Broughton’s views, like those of his contemporaries, fostered a robust conception of religious liberty or freedom of religious choice according to moral categories such as toleration and moral reasonableness. This book, then, deals with comparative religions, conversion, missions, and issues of colonial power and race during the English colonization of America.

The Page 99 Test: Heavenly Merchandize.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Cook's "Making a Mindful Nation"

Joanna Cook is a Reader in Medical Anthropology at University College London. My research interests focus primarily on the UK and Thailand, and extend across a range of different theoretical questions: mental health, preventative healthcare, self-cultivation; mindfulness, politics and well-being in the UK; monasticism, gender and ethics in Buddhist Thailand; power in Southeast Asia; detachment as an ethnographic object and as a theoretical tool; democracy, subjectivity and sociality.

Cook applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In interviews with members of the two Houses, this view was qualified somewhat, however, with members commenting that while they valued a sense of support within the mindfulness group, politics was combative, and it would be unreasonable to think that that would change. As a former Liberal Democrat minister told me as we took tea in the tea-room in the House of Lords a few weeks later, ‘This place is set up for opposition. Mindfulness helps me be well within that.’ Nonetheless, she said, mindfulness was far more than just a pragmatic tool. She attributed feeling happier and more settled in herself to her meditation practice; each day she noted her emotional experience on a chart that she kept next to her desk, and this daily practice of awareness supported her sense of well-being.

On its own terms, popular psychology claims to offer insights into pan-human psychological processes of deliberation, choice and emotion. Tracing the social life of psychological ideas, however, it is possible to consider the culturally specific ways in which universalising psychological principles are interpreted and incorporated into how people understand themselves. As psychological knowledge travels, it is interpreted in diverse ways by different people, and is reinscribed with specific ethical and political meaning. By examining the social life of psychology, we might account for the meaning that people attribute to practices, organisational structures and ideas, and we might uncover the internalisation of values, the development of social imaginaries and the aspirations that motivate engagement with practices.

The Page 99 Test is a partial success for Making a Mindful Nation and, as a bonus, there is a section break in the middle of the page, so page 99 covers a couple of key arguments.

Making a Mindful Nation is an ethnography of mental health in Britain, examining the popularity of mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism that has been incorporated into preventative mental healthcare.

On page 99, I first discuss the ways in which British parliamentarians engage with mindfulness. In this short section, I describe their understanding of mindfulness as both a pragmatic mental health support and as an ethical practice for living more fully. This is a key argument of the book: that mindfulness is simultaneously informed by instrumental and ethical values. But, while I conducted anthropological fieldwork with parliamentarians, I also worked with people with a history of depression, mindfulness-based therapists, and political advocates. In the rest of the book, I unpack how this relationship between different values informs mental health interventions, people’s relationships with themselves, political campaigns, and public policy.

In the second passage on page 99, I set up the ‘social life of psychology’, arguing that while psychological ideas refer to the universal structures of human minds, they are incorporated into people’s lives in culturally specific ways. This points to a second key finding of the book: that the category of ‘mental health’ has changed in recent years. In the book, I show that mental health is increasingly thought of as a transversal issue, as important for psychologist as for patients, politicians as for constituents. On page 99, readers get a glimpse of my argument that what we think about the mind matters.

Visit Joanna Cook's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Menaka Philips's "The Liberalism Trap"

Menaka Philips is an assistant professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), and in the Graduate Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (UTSG).

She received her PhD in Political Science in 2013 from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, and has an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Philips applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation, and reported the following:

The 99th page of The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation reads John Stuart Mill against the grain of his customary reception under the sign of ‘liberalism’. Focussing on Mill’s studies of class and inequality, it details how the practice of turning to Mill as the quintessential representative of liberalism has superseded attention to his politics. Though page 99 offers just a snapshot of what aspects of Mill’s politics have been obscured, the larger drama at the heart of The Liberalism Trap looms in the background. In an age where arguments about liberalism—its rise, decline, meaning, prospects and so on—dominate the focus of scholars and pundits alike, refusing to follow this now customary preoccupation is intentionally disruptive. The page illustrates through example the limits our interpretive customs impose on the way we practice—and imagine—politics.

Page 99 comes mid-way through chapter five, which outlines how Mill’s political economy challenges conventional ideological boundaries (in this case, between ‘socialist’ and ‘liberal’). As such, it works specifically to upset long-standing efforts to dismiss or minimize Mill’s socialist leanings and to thereby secure his identification with market liberalism. Instead, as I argue, Mill clearly mediates between “his investments in, and criticism of, socialist arguments,” by looking for ways to balance socialist calls for distributive equality, with defenses of market competition. That negotiation leads him to support worker cooperatives to balance “the individualizing interests of the commercial spirit and the collective aims of democracy.”

Notably, the page also highlights the distinctive approach I take in the book, which is to examine Mill’s political writings comparatively. Where Mill scholarship has traditionally separated his work on issues of gender, class, and empire, the book locates critical points of connection between his proposals for each. There are parallels, for instance, between Mill’s view of the family and his approach to worker cooperatives as key sites of civic education. In his writings on gender equality, Mill notes that the family is the “first school of virtues within which citizens are raised,” making it imperative that the relations between wives and husbands are premised on equality, not subordination. Similarly, Mill hoped that the practices of collective discussion and management entailed in cooperative organizations would make them yet another “great school of that public spirit,” acting to check an “unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit.” In both cases, Mill hoped to ascertain better ways of living and working together, which could expand not only the privileges, but also the duties of democratic citizenship.

Overall, page 99 demonstrates one of the critical arguments I make in the book, that Mill eschews ideological certainties in favor of a politics of uncertainty. In this way, the selection offers a good example of how the book approaches Mill’s politics: it takes seriously his rejection of ideological complacency in favor of experimentation, negotiation, and a disposition towards uncertainty as a fundamental condition of political life. Mill, as the page concludes, is a cautionary radical: his proposals keep “the aims of equity and justice in mind, while remaining characteristically attuned to the different sides of debate over reform.”

The purpose of The Liberalism Trap is to situate these examples in a broader account of what we miss when we rely too heavily on ideological labels to do the work of ‘speaking for’ the texts, authors, or ideas marshalled under those nominalist markers. However convenient it might be to focus on a singular label—or the example of one page—Mill himself would caution us that neither can substitute for wading through the messy, and often borderless work, of political thought and practice.

Visit Menaka Philips's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth W. Harl's "Empires of the Steppes"

Kenneth W. Harl is Professor Emeritus of Classical and Byzantine History at Tulane University, New Orleans. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on steppes civilizations, Roman history and numismatics, and has written extensively on Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Viking culture.

Harl applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in chapter 5 and it discusses how the charismatic nomadic leader (the first known in history) Modu chanyu (209-174 B.C.) used Chinese scribes to create a bureaucracy so that he could rule his nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu more effectively. Foremost, they adapted the Chinese ideograms to the language of the Xiongnu.

Page 99 is an appropriate introduction to the work, because I wrote from the perspective of the nomads who are known largely from written accounts of their foes and victims so that they are demonized as uncouth barbarians. The information on page 99 instead depicts these nomads on the Mongolian steppes as very quick studies who appreciated writing, technology, and material goods of the urban civilization of imperial China. They were far from maniacal barbarians bent on seizing plunder and slaves. They had to learn and adapt from their neighboring sedentary civilizations if they were to survive on the harsh conditions of the steppes. Therefore page 99 deals directly with a major theme of the book.

I wrote this book during the pandemic of 2020-2021, when my wife and I had to isolate given our age and medical condition. I had recorded a version of this course ten years earlier for the Teaching Company, but since then I gained so much more knowledge and rethought my ideas. Foremost, I wanted to present the little known history of these people from their perspective and also their contributions to the civilizations of Eurasia. The first half of the book deals with the earliest Eurasian nomads in Antiquity. The second half covers the Middle Ages in which the Turks and Mongols figure as the main nomadic peoples. The reader will be struck by how all these diverse nomadic peoples struggled to survive in such harsh conditions. They twice changed warfare by devising the light chariot in the Bronze Age, and then the mounted horse archer in the early Iron Age. Foremost, Attila the Hun emerges as a crucial figure in the birth of Medieval Europe, and one of the great ifs of history. If he had succeeded in taking Rome and marrying the empress Honoria, he might have created a Hun-Roman state so that the history of Europe would have been very different. Genghis Khan emerges as an exceptional strategic genius, but even greater credit goes to Kublai Khan, his grandson, who united China for the first time in four centuries and ensured that China would emerge as a world power. The reader will be amazed to realize that the thirteenth century was the Mongol century because they imposed a peace over Eurasia that resulted in revolutionary changes due to trade and the transmission of technology, ideas, and goods. Throughout the book, I have striven to make these people of long ago come alive so that the reader can sense what the spirit of these distant times was like, and why we should study these people.

Learn more about Empires of the Steppes at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erik R. Scott's "Defectors"

Erik R. Scott is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (2016) and editor of The Russian Review.

Scott applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, and reported the following:

Defectors gained fame for crossing some of the most heavily fortified borders of the Cold War world, and their flight in turn imbued these borders with even greater political significance. While Berlin Wall was the most famous section of the Iron Curtain, the line dividing capitalism and communism took many different forms. Speaking of the Inner German Border, page 99 of Defectors notes:

The Inner German Border was long, at over 600 miles; it was winding, with broad bulges and cul-de-sacs; it divided villages, spread across rivers, ran along a major autobahn route, and even made its way into the Baltic Sea.

The page goes on to discuss some of the border enforcement technologies that emerged during the Cold War: concrete guard towers, anti-personnel mines attached to tripwires, floodlights, closed-circuit surveillance cameras, and concealed gamma-ray detectors.

One of the most interesting discoveries I made in researching this book was that borders between allied socialist countries were also uneasy places. Later on in this page, I explore how Soviet bloc states shared border technologies even as the Soviet Union spied on border enforcement officers in other Warsaw Pact countries and defended the primacy of its claims on defectors. As I write toward the end of the page:

A 1958 agreement concluded between the USSR and its socialist allies established the basis for any member state to extradite criminals from any other member state. However, in a telling sign of the hierarchy within the alliance, extradition from the Soviet Union could be prevented if the individual was also accused of committing a crime on Soviet territory, a loophole that allowed Moscow to hold individuals from neighboring socialist states who entered the Soviet Union without authorization.

These hierarchies within the communist camp created resentment among the Soviet Union’s allies and ultimately helped undermine the Iron Curtain.

While Defectors explores the construction of Cold War borders in many other places across the globe, page 99 does give the reader a good sense of the primary ideological fault line of the era.

Learn more about Defectors at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carolyn L. Kane's "Electrographic Architecture"

Carolyn L. Kane is author of High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary, and reported the following:

On page 99, there is a historical discussion of one electrographic sign: The “Leaders of the World” sign (aka “Roman Chariot Race” by Ellwood E. Rice; 1909, NYC). It describes how the sign took three months to complete and was so large, it needed to be shipped from Dayton to New York City in eight railroad cars, the leading chariot requiring a car of its own. Once installed, the infrastructure was so elaborate, its concealment behind a complex of steel bars formed the physical equivalent of a three-story house (remember, this was 1909). The front of the sign was positioned on the south-facing side of the Hotel Normandie’s roof on Broadway and 38th Street, doubling the hotel’s height.

Page 99 is a good test. It offers a strong example of a New York City ("spectacular") which the book is concerned with analyzing––i.e. the historical development of large-scale electric signs in New York City in Las Vegas over the last century.

The book analyzes how, over the course of the last century, a white imaginary developed in America, fueled by entrepreneurial success, technological and scientific innovation, and an emergent polychromatic landscape of light and color previously unimaginable. Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary charts this history by focusing on the technical and aesthetic development of large-scale illuminated signage in New York City’s Times Square and Las Vegas’s Freemont Street, with special attention to the understudied role whiteness has played in these transformations.

While polychromatic, electrographic architecture may seem an unlikely candidate to allegorize America’s white imaginary, it is precisely for this reason—and for the claims to diverse and democratic color in places like Times Square (in the most ethnically diverse metropolis on the eastern seaboard)—that it is a prime candidate. Drawing on technological histories of illuminated light, architecture, and aesthetics, the book interrogates one of the most untapped questions of our times: How do the visual diversity, unpredictability, and heterogeneity of American urban centers like New York City also perpetuate historically entrenched legacies of Western chromophobia, running alongside the proliferation of urban capital?

Learn more about Electrographic Architecture at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue